I’ve lived in Australia and France and I’ve always attributed the taller size of Australians to the excellent state of their ventilation in buildings. Vents (and rooms themselves) are systematically bigger than in France, and if you live in a healthy environment, with meat, lots out outdoors during teen age, and correctly ventilated classrooms during their 20 best years, it makes no secret to me that they grew bigger.
Meanwhile in France we heat classrooms by stacking 35 kids in a confined space. It saves on heating, plus condensation that makes windows opaque helps pupils concentrate on the blackboard, as teachers said during my childhood.
Lake Peigneur was swallowed by a whirlpool like in an anime, in a sad drilling that took away entire boats. The salt geologic bubble under the lake can absorb gigantic volumes of water, and a drilling for the exploitation of petrol initiated the hole.
It’s beautiful because Boeing started, not with the smallest, but with the largest plane possible. Meanwhile Airbus started with Concorde, a completely orthogonal project to round up everyone’s identical patriotism, and both projects were absolutely beautiful in their own way!
The French famously got the Congés Payés (paid holidays) in 1936 after the big strike. You have great pictures of entire trains of Parisians going to the beach in Deauville by droves.
Meanwhile the Germans were working overnight to manufacture bombs. That, alone, is already a sufficient explanation on why we got invaded and lost our country to one of the evilest powers of Earth. France had to be rescued by the Russian, the English and the Americans after losing millions of inhabitants. Because we literally took too much holidays.
The one who works the most reaps the entire benefits. And it’s clearly not good to ask for less work all the time. Today France is peanuts on the international market, we are second at everything. Who heard of DailyMotion, which was once as big as Youtube, or Mistral, which was supposed to be our OpenAI?
Last industrial revolution (late 1700-to-1800), we invented world-scale capitalism, communism, democracy, having rights as humans, war at scale and we burnt our planet. I think the results of a revolution are really unfathomable and not even imaginable to humans.
We have a say at a 4th level of derived decision, which is 2 levels more than what people call a democracy. Also, the other political party will do it too.
= We don’t have a say. We voted NO to the new EU treaties in 2008 and the new president decided that electing him meant that we approved the same treaties.
The French are second to everything + they strip naked the CEOs they hate (the Air France event and the series of CEOs taken hostage in the 1990ies) = They would never align themselves to build something that makes money. DailyMotion is 1/1000th what Youtube is; Mistral is 1/1000th what OpenAI is, nothing has changed in 20 years.
Sure France would spend the money. We’d see none of the results.
Yes, I am saying that I don’t trust anyone who trusts obviously-bad science and requires me to believe it.
Some parts of science became political. The goal seems to convince a population, not determine what is true or not.
So if you extract one field which is extremely corrupt, with practices that would seem obvious to anyone who studied Stalin, which soils the ideas and principles of sciences, and another fields rejects the idea of denouncing the first field: that demonstrates that they are both politicized sciences. Covid science, climate science and social sciences all three ask you to “trust the science” and use authority to become right.
Meanwhile a researcher who is funded by private companies for technical advances, generally produces good science. They don’t usually need to jail their opponents.
> Having doors flying off one of your planes (…) definitely not a bit of politics.
It’s a checkmate of the American system. Boeing delegated construction in parts of the country that needed jobs (=politics), who then botched the job and didn’t get sanctioned because it was bad optics to accuse those providers (2013 airframes). More recent events are also a checkmate of the ultrafinanciarization practices, a checkmate of the consultancy / provider / controller model, and a failure of corruption (the FAA/Boeing dinners inherited from the Macdonnell management) in a context where USA rips at the seams (industrial failure, no-one can be trusted as trustworthy) and tries to renew its ideology (apogee with the Trump elections).
That is a fair bit of politics that made Boeing fail.
Tommy R was thrown feces upon him in a jail cell for 8 months (along with noise torture and losing 15% of his body weight out of food privation). Torture chambers fully exist for thought criminals in UK.
Meanwhile in France we heat classrooms by stacking 35 kids in a confined space. It saves on heating, plus condensation that makes windows opaque helps pupils concentrate on the blackboard, as teachers said during my childhood.